Infinite Potential

Summary: Several months after the asteroid crisis, the Ghost Zone faces a new threat, while Danny struggles with a trial of a more personal nature.

One

The Ghost Zone

She barely escaped from the Tower with
her life. Or, her afterlife, as it were. Pulled without warning,
along with many of her brethren, from their own time, they’d landed
in the middle of a siege. Not even when Pariah Dark had ruled the
Ghost Zone, before she and her brethren put him in the Sarcophagus of
Forever Sleep, had she seen such destruction. And in this
place! It was unthinkable.

They’d been summoned to the Tower by
its Master to help defend it against a lone enemy but, impossibly,
they had failed. Most of her brethren had fallen, and the Tower
would fall soon as well. The Master, even in the face of losing
everything, was impassive. He is mistaken if he believes that by
defeating me he can hold dominion over all that I command.

But she could not help but think he
would not need to. Without the Tower… without its Master… she
could scarcely think on all that could happen, here in the Ghost
Zone, and to the Human World as well.

With only two or three of her brethren
left defending against the onslaught, the Master pulled her aside and
gave her a single task: Find him. Warn him.

Her escape from the Tower had been
difficult. The destruction was already too great and the Master’s
powers too diminished for him to grant her direct access to the
destination he showed her. She would have to travel across the Ghost
Zone and into the Human World under her own power. Despite her
efforts at stealth, the enemy had seen her quit the Tower, and even
while focusing his tremendous energies on his siege, he had enough to
spare for an attack on her as well. A piece of himself separated off
and followed her, determined to destroy her. He would have
succeeded, had he not inexplicably recalled that part of himself at
the moment when her energy had waned to almost nothing. Without
sparing so much as a glance back at the Tower, she fled, trying her
best to ignore the hideous wailing sound that arose behind her, not
wanting to even contemplate what could cause such a horrifying sound,
or what it might mean for the Master and his Tower. Her mission was
clear.

And now, almost entirely depleted, she
flew across the Ghost Zone, calling upon every reserve she had to
accomplish that mission. She did not know the being whom she sought.
He existed an indeterminable number of years in her future. But he
was the only one besides her brethren who had succeeded in stopping
the Ghost King, or so the Master had told her. And here was an even
greater threat.

Find him. Warn him. The one he
thought was gone has returned.

City HallAmity Park

Please, kill me now.

Danny Fenton stood with his face buried
in the palm of his hand. There were some things that were just too
horrifying for even a half-ghost to face, and all the ghost powers in
the world could not save him from this, the most harrowing of all
ordeals: death by parental humiliation.

Not that he hadn’t had plenty of
chance to become battle-hardened over the course of his sixteen
years. He would have expected it to get easier with time, but Jack
and Maddie Fenton were the world’s foremost authority in this
particular brand of torture, always managing to outdo themselves in
finding the most twisted and diabolical ways to mortify their son.

At least this time it was only his
closest friends and not, say, the entire student body of Casper High,
who were witness to Danny’s abasement. Tucker Foley, his oldest
friend, leaned in and whispered in his ear. “Dude, is that what I
think it is?”

Sam Manson answered for him, her voice
a mixture of disbelief and amusement. “Oh, yeah.”

“Your dad is trippin’, Danny,”
Valerie Gray concluded. The most recent addition to their foursome,
Valerie was the least familiar with Danny’s parents’…
eccentricities.

Danny cringed. “Tell me something I
don’t know.”

It was dusk, and the sky had just
turned a dark purple as the four friends stood together on the wide
balcony just outside the rotunda atop Amity Park City Hall. They
were on the east side of the building, above the front entrance and
facing the enormous statue that depicted a determined-looking Danny
Phantom—Danny’s ghostly alter ego—with the world held aloft in
his right hand. In the southeast corner of the balcony, Danny’s
father was showing off his latest… well, invention wasn’t
exactly the right word. Crackpot idea came to mind. The
crackpot idea in question was a huge searchlight, oriented so that
its four-thousand-watt lamp pointed more or less in the direction of
FentonWorks, Danny’s parents’ research lab/workshop that doubled
as their family home. Affixed to the front of the lamp was a solid
black metal scrim with the shape of a ghost cut out of the center of
it.

Jack Fenton beamed in pride. “I call
this baby the Phantom Signal. Whenever ghosts attack our fair city,
Mayor Foley here can use it to call on our resident hero, Danny
Phantom—” He reached over and, brushing aside Danny’s friends,
yanked a yelping Danny into a one-armed embrace. “—and, of
course, his ghost-hunting gurus.” By this, he meant himself and
Danny’s mother, who was standing between the searchlight and the
wall of the rotunda.

Danny, who was seriously considering
going intangible so he could slip out of his father’s grasp and
through the floor, looked to his mother in desperation. “Mom,
please…”

“Jack…” She had that tone of
admonition she always had whenever she had to restrain her husband
from one of his nuttier schemes. “Don’t you think it’s a bit
much?”

Danny threw his mother a grateful look.
“Thank you!”

She continued as if Danny hadn’t
interrupted. “The last thing we want is for every metaphysical
miscreant in town to be alerted. A Phantom Phone hotline would work
much better, don’t you think?”

Danny groaned. “Mom…”

On the surface, his parents seemed like
a completely mismatched pair. Jack Fenton, a huge hulk of a man with
a square chin, small blue eyes, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair,
and a penchant for wearing bright orange jumpsuits, was loud in every
sense of the word. He was prone to an almost childlike excitability
over, well, pretty much anything, but ghosts in particular. This
combined with his mammoth size made him come off as somewhat oafish.

Maddie Fenton, in contrast, was a
slender, graceful woman. Her auburn hair was styled into a short,
no-nonsense bob with bangs that set off her warm, indigo eyes, which
could look either deep blue or violet depending on the light.
Skilled in almost everything she attempted, from martial arts to
marksmanship to baking cookies, she was as accomplished as her
husband was clumsy. Although she, too, always wore a jumpsuit, hers
was a more sober blue and came off more catsuit than circus tent.

It only took a few seconds of talking
with them, however, to see what a perfect match they were. Equally
obsessed with ghosts and ghost-hunting since long before Danny was
born, they were well-known in Amity Park for both their wacky
inventions and their boundless exuberance for all things
otherworldly, which sometimes masked how brilliant they really were.
It was their creation of the first manmade portal into the Ghost Zone
that had given Danny his powers in the first place. He’d been
fourteen then, and for two years, the only humans who knew about his
double life as Danny Phantom were Tucker, Sam, and his older sister,
Jazz.

That all changed when an asteroid the
size of a small moon was set on a collision course with Earth. When
all attempts to destroy or divert the asteroid failed, Danny had
convinced thousands of ghosts to band together at a specially
designed antenna in Antarctica that would transfer their
intangibility across the planet so the asteroid would pass harmlessly
through. The Fentons, Tucker, Sam, Valerie and her dad, and about
seventy other people from around the world had been manning a control
tower at the antenna when, for a brief moment, they’d thought Danny
had been killed in his attempt to recruit the other ghosts. In her
grief, Jazz had revealed to her parents—and everyone else within
earshot—that her brother was Danny Phantom, thus considerably
expanding the circle of humans who knew his secret. Danny then
confirmed it by changing from ghost to human in front of them all.

In the months since, Danny Phantom had
become an international celebrity, but judging by Danny Fenton’s
relative obscurity—and the fact that the government’s
not-so-secret anti-ghost unit, the Guys in White, had yet to ship him
off to some hidden installation and turn him into a half-human guinea
pig—his identity had not seemed to have leaked beyond the nearly
eighty people who had seen him change in Antarctica. It was a good
thing, because his mom and dad knowing was adjustment enough. Danny
loved his parents, and mostly he was glad they knew the truth, but
their enthusiasm to be involved in the ghost half of his life often
resulted in things like, well, this.

Gritting his teeth, he took a stab at
reining them in. “This is just…” Insane. Ridiculous.
Unbelievably lame. “It’s not really something we need.”

His dad crossed his arms over his
prodigious chest. “And when ghosts attack, what is Mayor Foley
supposed to do?”

Danny exchanged chagrined glances with
Amity Park’s improbable mayor. Tucker Foley, with his blue-green
eyes peering out from behind wide glasses, the huge assortment of
techno-gear stuffed into the pockets of his cargo pants, and that red
beret he always wore jammed on top of his head, was more Steve Urkel
than Barack Obama. And yet, he’d had the political savvy to parlay
his own celebrity at being the technical wizard behind the
intangibility transfer antenna into an appointment by the Amity Park
City Council to fill the then-vacant office of mayor. This despite
the fact that he was only sixteen and not even old enough to vote.

Now he displayed this savvy by opting
for the time-honored political tradition of passing the buck. He
held his hands up in sort of a don’t-look-at-me-he’s-not-my-dad
gesture, and Danny turned back to his father with a sigh. “Knowing
ghosts are attacking is really more of a Ghost-Sense thing than a
mayor thing, Dad.”

“You never know, Danny. What if some
spectral scum attacks City Hall? How will the mayor contact you?”

“Uh…” Tucker produced his cell
phone from his pocket. “Usually I just call him on his cell. He’s
number two on my speed dial.”

Danny’s father’s face fell like a
kid whose favorite toy had just been taken away. His lip sticking
out in a pout, he kicked at the floor with the toe of his boot. “A
regular old cell phone? Where’s the excitement? The dramatic
flair?”

“That usually comes when I’m
actually fighting the ghosts,” Danny said dryly. “And I really
don’t think City Hall is in any imminent danger of ghosts
attacking.”

A sudden stream of blue-tinged mist
escaping from Danny’s mouth contradicted him. He stifled a sigh at
the irony. “Although I could be wrong about that.”

The ghost arrived a second later, a
blur of dark purple descending upon them from the sky, aiming
straight for Danny as the whine of several ectoplasmic weapons
powering up around him competed with the sort of whirring sound that
accompanied Valerie suiting up in her armor. Danny hesitated for a
split-second—his first instinct was still to avoid going ghost in
front of his parents—before triggering the bright ring of light
that transformed him from black-haired, blue-eyed, jeans-clad Danny
Fenton into the white-haired, green-eyed, black-jumpsuited Danny
Phantom. The delay cost him, and he didn’t have enough time to go
intangible or fly out of the way or even brace for impact before the
ghost slammed into his chest, knocking him off his feet and onto the
floor of the balcony.

“Get away from my son, you filthy
putrid protoplasm!”

“Jack, wait! You might hit Danny!”

With a heave, Danny shoved the ghost
off of him, sending it flying into the searchlight and switching it
on. A ghost-shaped beam of light shone in the sky for a brief
moment, causing Danny’s dad to crow in delight, but then the real
ghost’s momentum knocked the searchlight into the low wall around
the balcony. The impact shattered the lamp, and Danny quickly
created an ectoplasm shield around it to keep shards of super-heated
glass from flying everywhere. The mini explosion contained, Danny
turned his attention back to the ghost, who was still crumpled on the
floor in a mass of purple robes. Three weapons and two Fenton
Thermoses were brought to bear as Danny finally got a look at it. A
hooded cowl, clasped with a green skull, hid its face, revealing only
glowing red eyes. Danny recognized the whole ensemble immediately.

“Lydia?” Sam, apparently,
recognized her as well. Lydia was the ghost companion of the former
Circus Gothica ringmaster, Freakshow.

Before Danny’s parents could blast
her, Danny flew over to Lydia and pulled her up off the floor. “What
are you doing here? Is Freakshow—?” He sucked in a breath when
her hood slipped down, revealing not the spike-haired, tattooed ghost
he was expecting, but an emaciated, skull-like nightmare with sunken
red eyes and long black hair. “Y-you’re not Lydia!”

Whoever she was, she sagged against
him, clearly more weakened than a single throw against the
searchlight should have caused. Although her skeletal face and
glowing red eyes made it hard to be sure, he got the distinct
impression that she was relieved. In a raspy voice, she wheezed,
“Ghost Boy…”

He gripped her by the shoulders. “Who
are you?”

She seemed unable to answer, but pulled
something out from under her robes and thrust it into his hands. It
was a medallion, shaped like a golden gearwheel with the letters CW
emblazoned in neon blue across the gear’s ebony center. It was
still attached to her neck by a thick, black ribbon.

He blinked. “Clockwork?”

With bony green fingers, she closed his
hand around the medallion. “He didn’t… see… it coming.”
Then she yanked on the ribbon, breaking it. With the medallion in
Danny’s hand and no longer around her neck, she disappeared in a
haze of blue light.

Jessie:
I wrote a review on fanfiction but I thought it would be fitting to write on on here too :) This story was honestly stunning. I am a budding writer myself and to read this- to FEEL this- reminded me of why I am honoured to have this passion and drive for a craft that is just so raw and beautiful.

MegaRogueLegend666:
I love this story so much. It's impossible to describe my excitement with each new chapter in words. The author has such a good writing style, very good descriptions of the fighting and character descriptions/emotions. the plot is also amazing! This fanfic could be a side anime show or novel ......

aeratheninja:
Interestingly enough, this story touches on different psychological states and was very informing, on top of being a solid story. Although somewhat predictable, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this; I could feel the fear and the frustration of the characters, and was happy when they were happy.Even ...

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This is a very interesting book - mostly because the heroine is quite charming and well rounded, and has very real issues to manage in her life. Most of all,. I loved the view inside of the life of a South Asian girl/woman, the emotional self-talk, the customs and preferences, the expectations a...

LouiseJ2:
I enjoyed the detail you went into with regards to the case. It made the UNSUB appear believable. The crisis in the middle of the story was my favorite part, very dramatic but not over the top. I feel like sometimes pairings can be overdone but I liked that some of the relationships were a little...

CookieMonster911:
The story overall was an adventure that is appealing to any age. The way the characters develop adds a more human characteristic to the novel. The writing style itself is amazing because you can learn every character's thoughts and emotions. The awkward love triangle and jerk moments adds to the ...

Tiffany Thomson:
This story is not something I would normally pick up and read but I'm so glad I did, I wasn't able to put it down and my husband was yelling at me at 3am to put it down and go to bed (just waited for him to doze back off before picking it back up) I really hope Natalie brings out another book eit...

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This is my first book reading on here and I absolutely loved it! If you like a book that'll keep you up late at night then this is your go to. What makes this novel so special is that it shows that even if your not blood related some people would put your needs before there's.

Prasino45:
Hi! I happen to see your updated chapter on FF.NET!It happened to be about you coming onto Inkitt with this story! I've been a fan for a while! I'm a scqualphie writer myself. I ship them HARD! Love this story! I'm gonna do a reread as you said you changed some things! Glad we both made the switc...

Sammi Chan:
THIS WAS AMAZING!!! My favorite part of this story was the slow build of Merlin and Arthur's relationship. Their relationship was rlly nicely fleshed out and so good :) The way that you handled the magic reveal was super enjoyable. I rlly liked the switching POVs. Good!Mordred was cute and I'm rl...